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District 219, Mexican Consulate Partner To Educate Parents Of Students

June 5, 2023 by patch.com Leave a Comment

Schools

Spanish-speaking parents and guardians will get the chance to earn the equivalent of a K-8 or high school diploma, district officials said.

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SKOKIE, IL — Local public high schools administrators are partnering with Mexican diplomatic officials to launch a new adult education program.

Spanish-speaking parents will have the opportunity to earn the equivalent of a K-8 or high school diploma, according to district officials.

Niles Township High School District 219 is launching the new partnership with the General Consulate of Mexico in Chicago to provide educational opportunities to parents and guardians of students in the district.

The program aims to aid parents in their personal growth while improving their ability to support their children academically, according to district officials.

The Reyna Torres Mendivil, General Consul of México in Chicago, her team, the District 219 Curriculum and Instruction Department and its Hispanic Unity Group partnered to develop the program.

District 219 representatives said the new program would offer a comprehensive range of courses customized to meet the needs and interests of local parents and guardians.

“Recognizing the essential role parents and guardians play in a student’s academic success,” district officials said in a statement, “this partnership aims to empower and engage through targeted educational initiatives.”

A private inaugural event to mark the start of the event is set for the afternoon June 9 at district offices.

Community leaders and representatives from the district and general consulate are due to speak, and organizers said it would showcase the programs objectives, introduce its stakeholders and outline the resources that it will make available to those who take part in it.


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Ban Phones From All Schools

June 6, 2023 by www.theatlantic.com Leave a Comment

I n May 2019 , I was invited to give a lecture at my old high school in Scarsdale, New York. Before the talk, I met with the principal and his top administrators. I heard that the school, like most high schools in America, was struggling with a large and recent increase in mental illness among its students. The primary diagnoses were depression and anxiety disorders, with increasing rates of self-harm; girls were particularly vulnerable. I was told that the mental-health problems were baked in when students arrived for ninth grade: Coming out of middle school, many students were already anxious and depressed. Many were also already addicted to their phone.

Ten months later, I was invited to give a talk at Scarsdale Middle School. There, too, I met with the principal and her top administrators, and I heard the same thing: Mental-health problems had recently gotten much worse. Even many of the students arriving for sixth grade, coming out of elementary school, were already anxious and depressed. And many, already, were addicted to their phone.

To the teachers and administrators I spoke with, this wasn’t merely a coincidence. They saw clear links between rising phone addiction and declining mental health, to say nothing of declining academic performance. A common theme in my conversations with them was: We all hate the phones . Keeping students off of their devices during class was a constant struggle. Getting students’ attention was harder because they seemed permanently distracted and congenitally distractible. Drama, conflict, bullying, and scandal played out continually during the school day on platforms to which the staff had no access. I asked why they couldn’t just ban phones during school hours. They said too many parents would be upset if they could not reach their children during the school day.

A lot has changed since 2019. The case for phone-free schools is much stronger now. As my research assistant, Zach Rausch , and I have documented at my Substack, After Babel , evidence of an international epidemic of mental illness, which started around 2012 , has continued to accumulate. So, too, has evidence that it was caused in part by social media and the sudden move to smartphones in the early 2010s. Many parents now see the addiction and distraction these devices cause in their children; most of us have heard harrowing stories of self-harming behavior and suicide attempts among our friends’ children. Two weeks ago, the United States surgeon general issued an advisory warning that social media can carry “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

We now also have more precedents: many more examples of schools that have gone entirely phone-free during the school day. So the time is right for parents and educators to ask: Should we make the school day phone-free? Would that reduce rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm? Would it improve educational outcomes? I believe that the answer to all of these questions is yes.

What Phones Do to Kids in School

Many studies have established that, despite schools’ rules against it, students check their phone a lot during class, and that they receive and send texts if they can get away with it. Their focus is often and easily derailed by interruptions from their device. One study from 2016 found that 97 percent of college students said they sometimes use their phone during class for noneducational purposes. Nearly 60 percent of students said that they spend more than 10 percent of class time on their phone, mostly texting. Many studies show that students who use their phone during class learn less and get lower grades .

You might be thinking that these findings are merely correlational; maybe the smarter students are just better able to resist temptation? Perhaps, but experiments using random assignment likewise show that using or just seeing a phone or receiving an alert causes students to underperform.

For example, consider this study , aptly titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” The students involved in the study came into a lab and took tests that are commonly used to measure memory capacity and intelligence. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups, given the following instructions: (1) Put your phone on your desk, (2) leave it in your pocket or bag, or (3) leave it out in another room. None of these conditions involve active phone use––just the potential distraction of knowing your phone is there, with texts and social-media posts waiting. The results were clear: The closer the phone was to students’ awareness, the worse they performed on the tests. Even just having a phone in their pocket sapped students’ abilities.

The problem is not just transient distraction, though any distraction in the classroom will impede learning. Heavy phone or social-media use may also have a cumulative, enduring, and deleterious effect on adolescents’ abilities to focus and apply themselves. Nearly half of American teens say that they are online “almost constantly,” and such continuous administration of small pleasures can produce sustained changes in the brain’s reward system , including a reduction of dopamine receptors. This shifts users’ general mood toward irritability and anxiety when separated from their phones, and it reduces their ability to focus. That may be one reason why heavy phone users have lower GPAs . As the neuroscientists Jaan Aru and Dmitri Rozgonjuk recently argued : “Smartphone use can be disruptively habitual, with the main detrimental consequence being an inability to exert prolonged mental effort.”

But smartphones don’t just pull students away from schoolwork; they pull them away from one another too.

The psychologist Jean M. Twenge and I have found a global increase in loneliness at school beginning after 2012. Students around the world became less likely to agree with survey items such as “I feel like I belong at school” and more likely to agree with items such as “I feel lonely at school.” That’s roughly when teens went from mostly using flip phones to mostly using smartphones. It’s also when Instagram caught fire with girls and young women globally, following its acquisition by Facebook, introducing selfie culture and its poisonous levels of visual social comparison.

One way that phones have hurt our relationships is through “phubbing” (a contraction of phone snubbing ), when a person breaks away from a conversation to look at their screen. Research shows that it interferes with the intimacy and perceived quality of social interactions. People who are more addicted to their phones are, unsurprisingly, the biggest phubbers , which may explain why people who are the heaviest users of phones or social media are also the most depressed and lonely . Once some students start phubbing others, then the others feel pressure to pull out their own phone, and in a flash, the culture of the entire school has changed.

If you have any doubt that phones in school stunt social connections, just talk to students about what happens at lunch time. My undergraduate students at NYU tell me that having real conversations is difficult, because most of their fellow students keep their phones on the table and frequently break away to check or respond to notifications. A 2018 study by the social psychologists Ryan Dwyer, Kostadin Kushlev, and Elizabeth Dunn tested my students’ intuition. They invited hundreds of college students and community members to share meals at a restaurant, with family or friends. They randomly assigned participants in each small group to either put their phones on the table or put them away. The results? “When phones were present (vs. absent), participants felt more distracted, which reduced how much they enjoyed spending time with their friends/family.”

I’ve been studying and writing about the effects of smartphones and social media on teens’ behavior, development, and mental health for six years now. To help organize the existing research on these topics, I’ve created a series of open-source Google documents , which I’ve curated with Rausch. We recently created a phone-free-schools collaborative review , cataloging the studies I’ve noted in this article and many more.

Consider the words of the MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her book Reclaiming Conversation : Because of our phones, she writes, “ we are forever elsewhere .” If we want children to be present, learn well, make friends, and feel like they belong at school, we should keep smartphones and social media out of the school day for as long as possible.

What Does It Mean to Go Phone-Free?

77% of U.S. schools .” But this high number seems to refer to a very low bar: It includes any school that tells students they should not use their phone while in class––unless the use is related to class. That’s not really a ban; it’s more of an unenforceable wish. Such a policy guarantees struggle between teachers and students, and it means that there are always kids looking at phones hidden in their laps or books, especially in the classes where the teacher has grown exhausted by the never-ending game of phone policing. As long as some kids are posting and texting during the school day, that raises the pressure on everyone else to check their phones during the school day. Nobody wants to be the last person to know the thing that everyone else is texting about.

Other countries are ahead of the U.S. on phone policy. France banned the use of mobile phones on school grounds through grade nine in 2018 (though the law allows students to keep their phone in their bag or pocket, so students still use their phone stealthily). In New South Wales, Australia, the use of mobile phones has been banned in elementary schools and will soon be banned in high schools, although schools can decide how to implement the bans .

Some schools in the U.S. have now taken similarly uncompromising stances on phones. For example, the author Mark Oppenheimer wrote earlier this year in The Atlantic about St. Andrew’s, a small boarding school in Delaware that allows students to use their phones only when in their dorm rooms, not when anywhere else on campus—a move that some students initially resisted but now has widespread student support.

More American schools—arguably all schools—should make themselves into genuinely phone-free zones. How would that look in practice? I think it’s helpful to think of phone restrictions on a scale from 1 to 5, as follows:

Level 1: Students can take their phone out during class, but only to use it for class purposes.

Level 2: Students can hold on to their phone but are not supposed to take it out of their pocket or backpack at all during class time.

Level 3: Phone caddies in classrooms: Students put their phone into a wall pocket or storage unit at the start of each class, and then pick it up at the end of that class.

These three levels seem to be the ones most commonly employed by American schools today. I believe that the first two are nearly useless. Many students do not have the impulse control to stop themselves from checking their phone during class time if the phone is within reach. One teacher at Scarsdale High School told me that even when a ban on using phones during class is enforced, some students will say that they need to use the bathroom in order to check their phone.

Phone caddies are a little better for learning, because they get the phone out of the student’s pocket, but their effect on school social life may be worse: A likely result of the practice is that all times between classes will be dominated by kids looking down silently at their phones, getting the fix they were denied for 50 minutes during class. When they do talk with friends, they’ll give those friends only a fraction of their full attention.

So let’s move on:

Level 4: Lockable pouches (such as those made by Yondr ). Students are required to put their phone into their own personal pouch when they arrive at school, which is then locked with a magnetic pin (like the anti-theft tags used in clothing stores). Students keep the pouch with them but cannot unlock it until the end of the school day, when they are given access to a magnetic unlocking device.

Level 5: Phone lockers. Students lock their phone into a secure unit with many small compartments when they arrive at school. They keep their key and get access to the phone lockers again only when they leave school.

Both of these practices put any student seen using a phone during the school day in clear violation of policy. They are the only two policies I know of that can create phone-free schools. They are the policies most likely to produce substantial educational, social, and mental-health benefits, because they are the only approaches that give students six or seven hours a day of time away from their phone.

Lockable pouches are low-cost and easy to implement. However, I have heard from some students that their classmates (aided by YouTube videos) find ways to open their pouches and use their phones whenever they think no adult is watching. (A Yondr employee told me that the company is working to improve its pouch lock, and also said that schools should do regular pouch checks, which would reveal the damage from the most common methods of illicit unlocking.)

Phone lockers may be more complicated to put in place, logistically—especially at large schools. But they are the most reliable way to separate students from their phone for the duration of the school day and would therefore deliver the greatest benefits.

A school that goes phone-free would still have to figure out what to do about laptops, tablets, and computers in the classroom. Students would surely use any internet-connected device to send and receive texts, and to reach their social-media accounts. Last year, I banned all screens––even laptops for taking notes—from all of my undergraduate and MBA classes, and at the end of each semester, students strongly agreed that this improved the class for them. But even absent a laptop ban, these larger devices are more easily managed and are not as likely as smartphones to disrupt social interactions outside of class.

T hose who oppose phone bans raise a number of objections. Smartphones can be useful teaching tools, for instance, and may make it easier for some teachers to create engaging lesson plans . That’s true, but any increase in engagement during a lesson may be offset by students getting distracted during the same lesson. When we add in the costs to all other teachers and the loss of social connection between classes, it’s hard to see how the marginal benefit of a phone-based lesson outweighs the costs of a phone-focused student body.

A more common argument comes from parents, many of whom are afraid that something might go wrong at school and want to ensure that they can reach their children at all times. These fears are understandable but are also part of the cause of Gen Z’s mental-health problems. In his book Paranoid Parenting , the sociologist Frank Furedi describes how a new style of protective parenting swept through British and American society in the 1990s, in response to the perception that risks to children were rising. When parents believe that everything is risky and they can’t trust other adults to protect their children, they take a more defensive approach to parenting. They try to protect their children from all risks, even when that deprives their children of valuable experiences of independence.

But today’s parents, who grew up during a period when crime rates were much higher than they are now, generally have fond memories of walking or biking to school with other kids, or just having time away from parental supervision to hang out with friends. I believe that children and teens would benefit developmentally if they were to go six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents.

What about school shootings? I’m the father of two high-school students, and of course I would want to connect with my children in such a nightmare scenario. But would a school where every student has a smartphone be safer than one in which only the adults have smartphones? Ken Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services , warns that using a cellphone during an emergency can increase safety risks. “During a lockdown, students should be listening to the adults in the school who are giving life-saving instructions,” Trump explains . “Phones can distract from that. Silence can also be key, so you also don’t want that phone noise attracting attention.” In addition, it seems to me that 300 parents rushing to the school in 300 cars would probably make things more difficult for first responders.

A s the teen-mental-health crisis rolls on and rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm continue to rise, we are not helpless. It would be great if social-media platforms enforced their own minimum age of 13 to open accounts, but all signs indicate that they won’t unless compelled by Congress. It would be great if Congress would compel them, and in fact several bills are being considered right now toward that end. It would be better still if the minimum age for using social media were raised to at least 16. The solutions to this crisis are wide-ranging, and some may need to involve the federal government.

But parents, teachers, and school administrators can take meaningful action too, right now. Although it’s outside the scope of this essay, parents who have not yet given their children a smartphone can resolve to provide only dumb phones until high school, and they can coordinate with the parents of their children’s friends, making that choice easier for all families involved. Schools that are using the lower levels of phone restriction can resolve to move up to lockable pouches or phone lockers, and many schools could implement these changes by September. My hope as a researcher is that a farsighted governor or school-district superintendent will implement these changes experimentally, by randomly assigning some middle schools to implement them as soon as possible and other schools to do so a year later. That way we could gain high-quality experimental evidence as to whether phone-free schools really confer the benefits that I have described.

“It helped me a lot,” one student at San Mateo High School in California told NBC News after her school started using lockable pouches. “Before, I would usually just like curl over in the side of my desk, and, like, check my phone and text everyone. But now there’s no other thing for us to look at or do except for talk to our teacher or pay attention.”

All children deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults. All children deserve phone-free schools.


This essay is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, After Babel .

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Boulder district is changing how students receive language services, keeping English learners in the classroom

June 6, 2023 by www.denverpost.com Leave a Comment

In Susan Tran’s first grade class in the Boulder Valley School District this past school year, she and a fellow teacher worked as a team — helping students focus on the language of math, breaking apart word problems and using words to compare, contrast, and describe different shapes.

The two-teacher arrangement is part of changes the Boulder school district is rolling out in how students identified as English learners receive language services in elementary schools.

Instead of pulling students from their classroom for approximately 45 minutes a day to receive English language development, the district is moving to a co-teaching model, where a teacher specialist pops into regular classrooms to help lead a lesson for all students with the classroom teacher.

“Anytime you watch a new teacher, you learn something new,” said Tran. About half of the students in her class are English learners.

R ead the full story from our partners at Chalkbeat Colorado .

Chalkbeat Colorado is a nonprofit news organization covering education issues. For more, visit co.chalkbeat.org .

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America’s Most Exciting Emerging Arts District Is In… St Louis?

June 5, 2023 by www.forbes.com Leave a Comment

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A contemporary art museum with a knack for exhibiting the next big thing next door to another arts museum housed in a building globally recognized as an architectural marvel.

An astonishingly beautiful symphony hall across the street from another of the nation’s premiere performing arts venues.

An arts hotel where you can select your room by color .

An annual music festival . Music and podcast recording studios.

A literary café. A mural park. A jazz club. A nightclub with open turntable DJ nights.

Art galleries.

Artist studios and rehearsal spaces for theatre and dance.

A fine art printing shop.

A bold food concept unlike any other in America.

There’s even a one-ring, big top circus .

Put it all together within a half-mile radius and you have the Grand Center Arts District in St. Louis, the most exciting emerging arts district in America.

The Old

Powell Hall stands as the grande dame of Grand Center, a neighborhood about midway between the Gateway Arch on the Mississippi River and the city’s 1,300 acre Forest Park–New York’s Central Park has 840 acres by comparison. Opened in 1925 , the fantastically ornate interior featuring iconic red velvet chairs has been home to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra since 1968.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra wrapped up its 143 rd season in 2023, the second oldest in America and one of the finest in the world.

Powell Hall will be closed for the next two years allowing for a $100 million renovation by Snøhetta, the most sought-after architecture firm in the world.

Upon reopening in 2025, venerable Powell Hall will have updated plumbing, electrical, HVAC, lighting, seating and ADA accessibility. A new lobby will be added along with a new education center and an entirely new backstage wing benefiting performers and stage crew.

Powell Hall has brought St. Louisans to Grand Center for arts and culture since the Vaudeville days and will continue serving as the neighborhood’s crown jewel for decades to come. Its presence, and that of other historic performing arts venues in the neighborhood, not surprisingly, set the foundation for the vibrant cultural momentum surging through the area today.

“The Grand Center Arts District has been one of our most important arts and entertainment destinations for many, many years; it had the anchor institutions, but it also had a lot of vacancy around it,” Chris Hansen, Executive Director for the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, told Forbes.com.

Powell Hall and the adjacent “Fabulous” Fox Theatre , which opened in 1929 and continues hosting Broadway shows and major national touring musicians and comics today, were the traditional one-two punch for performing arts in St. Louis.

When the Pulitzer Arts Foundation debuted its revolutionary Tadao Ando-designed building as a non-collecting arts museum in 2001 a few hundred feet from the Fox, which is a few hundred feet from Powell Hall, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis opened two years later literally next door to the Pulitzer building, the imaginative floodgates for the arts in St. Louis broke loose. No longer was any dream too big.

Today, the Kranzberg Foundation funds many of those dreams.

The Kranzberg family has been St. Louis art patrons for 50 years, but the Foundation launched in 2006 with the unusual aim of supporting the arts through real estate. The Foundation makes its mission developing the venues, studios and workspaces artists across all disciplines need to foster their careers.

“No one wants to give an arts organization money when they’re bad operators of a building and they bleed out all their money on heat, light and power or poor operations of the facility,” Hansen explained. “When we come in and develop these (facilities), we’re building capacity for these organizations and we’re able to help them scale from a 50-capacity room to a 2,500-capacity room, but we’re also providing operational support. When they get money from funders, that money can go into programming, it can go into building staff capacity, they’re not as concerned about facilities management.”

The Kranzberg Foundation buys and operates the spaces where art takes place, allowing the artists to focus on what they do best: art.

Grand Center became a natural focus for these efforts because of its proximity to existing arts institutions and available, affordable real estate.

“This was an obvious place where arts infrastructure already existed, but we wanted to lower that barrier, make it easier for art to start, not just graduate, in this area, and create more of a pedestrian friendly, walkable version of an arts district that’s historically been a ticket-in-your-hand kind of district–you know where you’re going, you park there, and then you leave,” Hansen said.

What the Foundation is working toward creating in the neighborhood is a neighborhood. A community. Places for artists to work, for neighbors to access free public art, a destination of constant cultural discovery for locals and visitors alike.

“We truly believe that artists are the soul of our city and that when we nurture the arts, we affect health and wealth in our region,” Hansen said. “We see the arts broadly as one of the great reasons to live in St. Louis, work in St. Louis, visit St. Louis . It’s part of economic development. It’s part of creating a vibrant community that’s connected, and without it, nothing else looks quite the same or feels quite the same.”

The New

While the Foundation has been developing creative infrastructure in Grand Center since opening the multi-use The Kranzberg arts center in 2006, just since 2019, it has been rapidly putting more points on the board along Washington Avenue behind Powell Hall. Here, on a stretch of city street once more accustomed to muffler shops, Walls Off Washington mural park, Boulevard Fine Art Printing, Sophie’s Artist Lounge and a particular source of pride, High Low Literary Arts Café, reside.

“We have nearly a dozen arts organizations, primarily literary focused, that have workspace on the second floor. They meet the public in the library and cafe and the listening room. We have rotating exhibitions in the gallery there,” Hansen details. “It’s an amazing connection between the people who live and work here, the creatives who produce here, and the literary arts community at large.”

Also sharing the building are Bullivant Gallery, Metro Theatre Company, Peter Martin’s jazz media center plus offices and rehearsal space for the Shakespeare Festival. Siting these businesses together reaps benefits of its own.

“It’s not our job to curate anything, it’s (to) put people in proximity; there’s magic to that,” Hansen said. “When you do that well, it builds a wave of momentum, and we have that moment. These connections between creative artists, applied arts, traditional music industry–you have marketing agencies and tech industries here–it starts to put together a framework for how the arts drive opportunity, it’s dynamic. It takes a certain economy of scale to get it done, but it’s powerful.”

The Food

Bulrush , a contemporary dining and craft bar experience, shares a wall with High Low. Here, two-time James Beard award semi-finalist chef Rob Connoley explores the historic roots of Ozark cuisine. His family has been in the area since the 1830s.

What is Ozark cuisine?

“It’s not squirrel and ‘possum,” Connoley told Forbes.com, laughing, “although, it is squirrel and ‘possum,” he adds with another laugh.

Levity aside, Connoley’s vision for Bulrush is deeply principled.

“We want to go back to the origin of how Ozark food was actually created,” Connoley explains. “We’re pushing the idea of what it would mean to be a restaurant based on the principles and philosophies of reparations where we look at the true origin and attribution (of the cuisine).”

Beyond a star vehicle for a hot chef, Bulrush pays dishwashers $25 an hour and staff members receive full insurance and paid vacation.

When not at the restaurant, Connoley scours the surrounding region foraging for ingredients he’ll later be cooking in the round for guests. Ingredients on the Ozark tasting menu at Bulrush are almost exclusively locally sourced and not just seasonal, but “hyper-seasonal.”

Bulrush serves dinner Thursday through Sunday. Urban Chestnut Brewing and Biergarten across the street–this is St. Louis after all–and Turn brunchery down the block serving a biscuit flight cover the off hours.

The Music

As exciting as this all seems, the stretch vision for Grand Center is creating a Music Row for the Midwest.

“St. Louis has a deep, deep musical legacy and a big music scene, but it’s pretty spread out right now,” Hansen said.

Chuck Berry, Miles Davis and Nelly are all St. Louisans. Top that! The city is a historic and contemporary hotbed for blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll and hip hop.

These are the credentials Grand Center is building on.

“Between Grand, where the Fox Theater and Jazz St. Louis is, and Compton Avenue (one block east of High Low), we will have the largest concentration of live music venues in the region,” Hansen forecasts. “What we’re hoping to do is attract more small venues to infill this and have a real focused concentration on attracting music industry and new musical opportunities for patrons that don’t require a ticket in your hand, where you can just pull the door and go in and hear live music.”

With everything already accomplished in the neighborhood, there’s no reason to believe it will fall short of this goal.

“We want St. Louis to be a premier arts and entertainment destination and we want St. Louis artists and creative organizations to be the premiere in their class worldwide,” Hansen said. “We want to continue to catapult our great artists out of here, and see them find success on the global stage, but know that St. Louis is home and bring their economy back here and choose to live, work and build their families here. We have the talent to do it. We have the infrastructure. We have the support. We have the legacy. Now it’s about connecting the dots.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Grand Center Arts District, Arts, americas center st. louis, america center st louis, america center st louis hotels, americas center st louis events, americas center st. louis mo, america center st louis mo, restaurant st louis art museum

Yatton: Call for more on-call firefighters after school blaze

June 1, 2023 by www.bbc.co.uk Leave a Comment

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By Christopher Mace
BBC News

More people are being urged to become on-call fire fighters after it emerged a fire engine was sitting unused as a Somerset school burned nearby.

Six of Yatton Infant School’s classrooms were destroyed on Monday and it took nine crews to tackle the blaze.

But the closest fire engine could not be deployed due to a lack of staff.

Yatton Fire Station relies on on-call teams – people who have a separate job but are available at a moment’s notice.

Avon Fire and Rescue said just one person from Yatton’s on-call team had been available, meaning the local fire engine could not be used.

The service said this had not affected its ability to tackle the fire.

Ben Thorpe, on-call station manager, said: “There was only one member of staff available from Yatton fire station and we can’t deploy a fire engine just with one person unfortunately.

“That’s not to say Yatton was left without any fire cover because that’s not the case.

“There will be other resources we have around the service area that are strategically placed to make up those shortfalls regardless of whether there is a crew available at this particular fire station.”

But Mr Thorpe urged more people to consider training as on-call crew.

“It is a really satisfying job, you get great team work within a fire station and I encourage anyone to do it – make that enquiry, come and see what we do.”

But a firefighters’ union said the level of commitment compared to the pay made it difficult to attract and retain on-call crew.

At Avon Fire and Rescue, on-call firefighters are expected to be available for either 87 hours a week, or 120 hours, equating to around 75% of their time.

The latter receive £287.50 per month, plus extra payments for every callout they attend.

Val Hampshire, from the Fire Brigades Union South West, said: “What (applicants) find is that they do the training and they say ‘I can’t continue doing this because I can’t afford to do it any more’.”

She said many felt the pay was not sufficient recognition for the danger they might potentially put themselves in.

Mr Thorpe acknowledged the role was a “massive commitment” and that most people would not have the job flexibility to take it on.

But for those who can, he said the job offers training and experience applicants can use “across the board”.

Avon Fire and Rescue said it was always looking for more on-call firefighters, and was actively recruiting to try and ensure the best coverage it could.

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  • Avon Fire and Rescue Service
  • Yatton

More on this story

  • Firefighters tackle blaze at school

    • Published
      29 May

  • School to look for temporary classrooms after fire

    • Published
      7 days ago

Related Internet Links

  • Home – Avon Fire & Rescue Service

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